When a similar thing happened to the entire of the UK, and British people could no longer anonymously edit Wikipedia, there was a huge outcry. All British internet users were being transparently proxied through a handful of IP addresses. You could still edit with an existing account, but not anonymously. See IWF and Wikipedia: effects. It was such a big deal that the IWF had to back down and unblock Wikipedia.
why, exactly, the submitter thinks Verizon gives a rat's rear end whether or not their customers can edit Wikipedia pages?
Because, if it's anything like the British experience, their customers care and will complain a lot.
It always made me wonder why they didn't just pay gold, even if it was an incredible amount, for the knowledge to secure their own salt.
You're talking about the Trans-Saharan gold and salt trade. The salt the Mediterranean traders brought came from salt mines in North Africa, not from the sea. I guess that the amount produced by evaporating salt water was tiny compared to mining, and thus commercially unviable.
It's basic game theory. If you can make a profit out of something that will kill you, you might as well.
The game theory is indeed simple - it's better to have 20% of a billion person market than 0%. The commercial airplane industry is largely dominated by Boeing and Airbus - two Western companies that have both received substantial state support The market for jet engines is dominated by Rolls-Royce. Given how interested Western nations are in having their own commercial aircraft manufacturing capability, it is no surprise that China also wants one.
This will not kill Boeing or Airbus. Unlike cheap crap that people buy off ebay, the commercial airplane market in the West is quite image sensitive and financially and managerially cautious. They are not going to switch fleets to cheaper Chinese aircraft just to save a few dollars. Consider that Rolls-Royce jet engines are the standard in commercial aviation, and they certainly aren't the cheapest, but everyone still pays up - because any airline that switched in order to save a few dollars would be crucified if the new aircraft crashed.
You know that Islam doesn't recognize the separation of church and state, don't you?
The separation of Church and state that you are familiar with is a result of the United States constitution. It is certainly not required by Christianity, and until relatively recently most European nations were under the control of the Church. Even the Kings of England, historically resistant against Catholicism, once sworn loyalty to the Pope.
I'm afraid that Islamic areas are always going to run into this problem because of the bad precedent set early in Islam's history - when church and state were one entity, and presumably, that's the way "God wanted it".
The power of the Catholic Church was essentially unchallenged on mainland Europe for the better part of two millennia. Wars were waged in the name of the Church, resulting in the deaths of millions. New branches of Christianity that threatened the power of the Church were decried as heresies and brutally suppressed, with entire cities being slaughtered ("Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."). Before you are so critical of others, you might want to remember the phrase: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
If they want my political support, these people need to start separating church and state.
The separation of Church and state in the United States was a wonderful idea of the Founding Fathers, but it is not something that is common throughout the Western world. England has the Church of England, Finland has the Church of Finland, etc, and when it comes to the separation of politics and religion, there are many Christian political parties that wield power in government.
Given that we have not yet achieved a complete separation of Church and state in the West, I think it is somewhat unrealistic to think that Muslim countries are going to be so forward thinking.
In this case, it means the freedom to be oppressive and violate the freedom of others, in accordance with their religion.
Blasphemy as a crime is common in most religious societies. John William Gott was the last person in Britain to be imprisoned for heresy, in 1921. The last person to be executed for heresy in Britain was Thomas Aikenhead in 1697. Both had been critical of Christianity. The fact that Hamas are only going to imprison this man, rather than execute him, suggests that their law is only 90 years behind that of Britain.
OK you've shifted the goalposts a bit from what can be mixed up on the spot from things that get past sniffer dogs (or nitrogen sensing equipment) to stuff prepared earlier
The plotters plan was to prepare the liquid bomb earlier, and carry it onboard in a regular 500ml soft drinks bottle. The plan was to use a syringe to fill the bottle, so the "tamper proof" screw top would be intact, and the bottle would attract little notice when going through security.
As far as I know, there are no sniffer dogs or nitrogen sensing equipment in use for boarding security at most British airports. I know the government is planning to bring in some high tech scanners, but I haven't seen any yet. And even if there were such technology, would it detect explosives in a sealed plastic container, even if the outside was washed? The plotters planned to use an explosive detonator in an AA battery - if it were sealed and washed, would there be any residue for the scanners to detect?
Please note that they stop you bringing on water and not lighter fluid!
Lighter fluid is restricted to the amount you can put in a regular size refillable lighter. You can take on a litre of vodka from the departure lounge shops though, which should burn quite well.
Please tell me then what the journalists know but the worlds best chemists don't.
Sidney Alford made the liquid bomb for the BBC that is in the video I already referenced He is a qualified explosives engineer, and the man behind explosives.net. He has a long history of contracting for governments and militaries in explosives technologies, including for the U.S. Army and for the Ministry of Defense in Afghanistan. Quoting from that article, "Staff Sergeant Snowy White, of the Royal Engineers Trials and Development Unit, described Sidney as a 'pure genius'". The MOD refer to him as an expert in IEDs.
So, a recognised and qualified expert in the IED field not only built a liquid bomb, but also detonated it inside a plane fuselage, filmed by the BBC. Such an attack may require a degree of skill and planning, but it is obviously possible.
BBC News article - watch the embedded video for a real-life detonation of a liquid bomb inside an aircraft fuselage.
Why do we still have the liquid restrictions when they are not a credible threat?
The Judge in the case disagreed: "I'm satisfied that there is every likelihood that this plot would have succeeded but for the intervention of the police and the security service. Had this conspiracy not been interrupted, a massive loss of life would almost certainly have resulted - and if the detonation was over land, the number of victims would have been even greater still."
Just look at all the people who immediately rushed to Google's defense by attacking the NLPC...
I remember the vast majority of the defensive posts being entirely technical and not political. The issue was that Google used some modified version of a tool like tcpdump, dumped raw packets, and didn't strip packets that might contain http headers or other potentially identifiable information. Nobody has alleged that Google used this raw data for anything nefarious, and nobody appears to be arguing that it's collection was anything more than a simple programming oversight. The defensive posts generally boil down to two points:
The data was sent unencrypted over public airways
Storing the raw unfiltered data was an accident and any potentially personal data was never used for anything.
Those are both technical arguments, not U.S. political arguments.
You cannot criticize Google on Slashdot....
Sure you can, people do all the time - if Google really were secretly collecting masses of personal information then they would be criticised. But this is a really odd argument, since Google of all corporations don't have to - since they already openly collect personal information and use it to target adverts, with the full cooperation of their users. Google doesn't need to sniff private data from your public wifi, and it makes little sense that they would deliberately do so, given the huge backlash it could cause.
If not exaggerated, that is mind-numbingly fucked up. I understand it to be about the same way in the UK
It is. For some reason, British people think it is not ok to beat to death the old lady who lives next door when she walks into the wrong flat, or to shoot and kill the kids down the street when they try to steal your CDs, or to execute the drunk man who walks across your lawn at 3am, or to shoot the homeless girl looking for an empty squat for the night. It's an odd society - one where you are only allowed to kill someone in defence of your own life, rather than in defence of your stuff or because they trespassed against you.
Please do explain how this works, because from where I sit it seems entirely political in nature, with a religious wrapping - which is just what the Parent is suggesting.
You are both right. The majority of people in the world are taught from birth to believe in a God, and that it is right to follow the teachings of the Holy men, including going to war. Some of the Holy men are religious fundamentalists, and they will demand war against those who follow a different religion. They will justify the war with reference to the Holy scriptures, and this will provide a self-reinforcing story that the people will follow (self-reinforcing because, as a result of the violence. they can refer to new acts of savagery that their opponent has carried out). However, the religious leaders are also rational, and will not usually carry out actions that will weaken their own power base or result in their own destruction. For example, the Iranian religious leaders will not directly attack the U.S. or Israel, as this would ensure their destruction. The violence is geo-political in nature, but in order to justify and motivate the population it is necessary to create a religious narrative that they can follow.
It wouldn't follow, though, to attack the Twin Towers. What sort of religious icon were they?
The goals of the leadership of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are geo-political: resistance against the House of Saud and it's U.S. backed dictatorship being the most obvious. There is a great amount of social injustice in Saudi Arabia, resulting from a huge inequality in the distribution of wealth - millions of ordinary people live in abject poverty, whilst a few thousand people in the royal family control trillions of dollars in personal wealth. This leads to a society in which corruption is the norm, and where the wealthy can literally "get away with murder". It is not difficult to see why ordinary people might want to replace the existing system with something that seems a little fairer. The Islamists offer them a future governance based on what they perceive to be a better system, where the rules are supposed to be applied equally regardless of wealth or position in society. Throw into this the fact that the U.S. is a major ally of the House of Saud, supplies a huge amount of military and intelligence hardware, and at one point had 10,000 troops stationed there, and it is not difficult to see how the resentment shifts from the House of Saud and onto the U.S.
The average citizen of these countries is poorly educated, and often illiterate. Justifying and motivating them towards acts of violence through geo-politics is hard - how do you convince a man to commit suicide, or otherwise take enormous personal risks, in order to destabilise the governing regime? A rational man will usually believe that his own death is not justified except in exceptional circumstances, and overthrowing his government is not usually one of those. The concept of "life after death with big rewards" is essential to the narrative that enables self-sacrifice towards the attainment of geo-political goals.
So, people attack targets like the Twin Towers because they observe massive social injustice in their home land. Their religious leaders tell them that this injustice is the fault of people outside of their social group, and that God wants them to make the world a better place, and that when they die they will receive the reward of an eternal life. They are personally motivated by religion, and by a sense that the world that they are fighting against is unjust. However, the Twin Towers is chosen as a target because it is a symbol of the injustice; this is not about "glorifying" a religion, it is about striking back against an "evil empire" that is seen as being intimately linked with the social problems of the population as a whole.
Are you really a fundamentalist, or just someone who says he is? Do you really interpret every word in the sacred texts as literal truth? If so, which holy book is it that you believe and follow unquestioningly?
And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
Science doesn't "prove" anything - we just create models that best explain the observable data. If you are willing to accept that these models better explain the world than some of the stories in your holy book, then you aren't a fundamentalist.
Indeed. The headline is alarmist - "Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland" makes it sound like they just made a huge change without consulting anyone, but Shuttleworth does say they have consulted others, and he predicts that it will take a year to get the first images out, and 4 years or more to shift applications onto Wayland. Shuttleworth is talking about a long-term direction, and it doesn't seem to be a rash decision - Intel and Nokia both appear to be backing Wayland for mobile devices.
Something like this was bound to happen after Google decided not to use X for Android. The Linux world would benefit greatly from a fast and lightweight display server that has a common codebase for mobile devices and desktops, and can be used as a backend for Android, Meego, KDE and Gnome.
If you voluntarily upload your web site to a CDN that tells you it is going to optimise your code, what legal issues could there be? The arrangement is entirely mutually consensual. If you don't want your site optimised, then don't use that CDN.
the performance of VM based systems is predictable
I agree that benchmarking a single VM on a VM host is a valid thing to do, and will give fairly reproducible results. But it can get more difficult with more complex setups. You need to be able to manage the complexity and eliminate or randomise all the factors. Benchmarking a single VM running on a VM host with 20+ other active VMs, with snapshots being created and merged, and with variable network and disk configurations, gets more difficult.
All the testing with Phoronix Test Suite is repeated until there is less than 3% variance between the results - or the result set is discarded.
What is the minimum number of replicates for each setup? 3% variance may occur easily with a low number of replicates, but that is not going to give you statistically significant results. Also, what order are the experiments run in? There may well be some autocorrelation caused by caching etc.
They tested in a VM. Now where's the proof that by itself doesn't affect performance in an unpredictable way?
If they test in a VM, on only one particular hardware configuration, then the results only apply to that specific test setup. If the fact that the experiments are run inside a VM introduces variability into the results, then this will show up as a large variance. However, having a larger variance does not in itself negate the results - but remember that the results can't be generalised to other configurations - they only apply to this particular setup.
In order to produce experimental results that can be generalised you need to run your experiments on a randomised configuration of hardware and VM host software. Either test every possible combination of factors - hardware, VM host sw, sw under test - (full factorial), or some subset (fractional factorial).
I'm usually one of the first to bash Phoronix for not doing multiple replicates or any statistical analysis of their experiments, but things appear to have changed this time. Some of the big criticisms of Phoronix's benchmarks in the past were that they didn't consider whether or not their results were significant - instead doing only one replicate for each configuration, plotting a barchart, and concluding "X was 5 FPS faster. Therefore it wins!" Apparently they're now doing multiple replicates and some proper statistics to calculate whether or not observed differences are actually statistically significant ("our kernel test results were automated, easily reproducible, and statistically significant"). Also the graphs are showing error bars +/- 1SD. This is good. This means that if you want to reproduce their experiments, it should be easy to do so. You can get an idea from the graphs whether a difference is significant.
(Having said that, I'm not sure why some of the data points don't have error bars - presumably the standard deviation was very low? I also can't see the number of replicates mentioned anywhere - maybe he used his "dynamic number of trials" scheme, but statistically speaking this may well be a bad thing - if he is using only 2 or 3 trials there is some probability of getting the first few samples with similar variance, he should probably stick to doing a fixed 10 to 30 replicates instead).
Do you have any evidence that the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis is producing fraudulent GDP figures?
People know with certainty if they have a job or not and how much it pays.
Yes, but what they don't know is why they can't find a job. If the economy declines and jobs are lost, then so is consumer and market confidence. In that environment, employers may be less likely to invest in new staff, even though they are seeing business pick up. The growth needs to be sustained for some time before business leaders will feel confident enough to begin taking on new employees.
Something like 86% of voters listed the economy as their first concern.
This means nothing - the economy is always the main concern of voters except in extreme situations (e.g. war). Remember the Democrats call of "It's the economy, stupid"
they haven't done anything to reverse the disaster... If the economy was actually improving the voters would not have voted as they did.
U.S. GDP growth 2006-current. Obama assumed office in January 2009. At the time growth was around -7%. Since then it rose to 5% and dropping back to 2%. Whether you believe Obama may or may not be wholly or partly responsible for this is debatable, but the turnaround in the figures after his election in early 2009 is clear.
If the economy was actually improving the voters would not have voted as they did.
Voters never vote against the incumbent party when the economy is growing?
Slashdot Mirror
When a similar thing happened to the entire of the UK, and British people could no longer anonymously edit Wikipedia, there was a huge outcry. All British internet users were being transparently proxied through a handful of IP addresses. You could still edit with an existing account, but not anonymously. See IWF and Wikipedia: effects. It was such a big deal that the IWF had to back down and unblock Wikipedia.
why, exactly, the submitter thinks Verizon gives a rat's rear end whether or not their customers can edit Wikipedia pages?
Because, if it's anything like the British experience, their customers care and will complain a lot.
It always made me wonder why they didn't just pay gold, even if it was an incredible amount, for the knowledge to secure their own salt.
You're talking about the Trans-Saharan gold and salt trade. The salt the Mediterranean traders brought came from salt mines in North Africa, not from the sea. I guess that the amount produced by evaporating salt water was tiny compared to mining, and thus commercially unviable.
It's basic game theory. If you can make a profit out of something that will kill you, you might as well.
The game theory is indeed simple - it's better to have 20% of a billion person market than 0%. The commercial airplane industry is largely dominated by Boeing and Airbus - two Western companies that have both received substantial state support The market for jet engines is dominated by Rolls-Royce. Given how interested Western nations are in having their own commercial aircraft manufacturing capability, it is no surprise that China also wants one.
This will not kill Boeing or Airbus. Unlike cheap crap that people buy off ebay, the commercial airplane market in the West is quite image sensitive and financially and managerially cautious. They are not going to switch fleets to cheaper Chinese aircraft just to save a few dollars. Consider that Rolls-Royce jet engines are the standard in commercial aviation, and they certainly aren't the cheapest, but everyone still pays up - because any airline that switched in order to save a few dollars would be crucified if the new aircraft crashed.
Abuse of moderation to -1 a comment that you don't want others to read in an article on free speech? Interesting...
You know that Islam doesn't recognize the separation of church and state, don't you?
The separation of Church and state that you are familiar with is a result of the United States constitution. It is certainly not required by Christianity, and until relatively recently most European nations were under the control of the Church. Even the Kings of England, historically resistant against Catholicism, once sworn loyalty to the Pope.
I'm afraid that Islamic areas are always going to run into this problem because of the bad precedent set early in Islam's history - when church and state were one entity, and presumably, that's the way "God wanted it".
The power of the Catholic Church was essentially unchallenged on mainland Europe for the better part of two millennia. Wars were waged in the name of the Church, resulting in the deaths of millions. New branches of Christianity that threatened the power of the Church were decried as heresies and brutally suppressed, with entire cities being slaughtered ( "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." ). Before you are so critical of others, you might want to remember the phrase: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
Also see Unreported World: The Battle for Israel's Soul
It seems there are plenty of fundamentalists on both sides who don't want peaceful coexistence.
If you go around saying judaism is fake, absolutely nothing is going to happen to you. Well, some people may be pissed off, but that's it.
Morgan Spurlock got attacked for less than that. He was just asking questions - no criticism of Judaism, just trying to interview people on the street....
It's like the West in the Middle Ages.
You don't need to go that far back... It's like the West in the 1920s...
If they want my political support, these people need to start separating church and state.
The separation of Church and state in the United States was a wonderful idea of the Founding Fathers, but it is not something that is common throughout the Western world. England has the Church of England, Finland has the Church of Finland, etc, and when it comes to the separation of politics and religion, there are many Christian political parties that wield power in government.
Given that we have not yet achieved a complete separation of Church and state in the West, I think it is somewhat unrealistic to think that Muslim countries are going to be so forward thinking.
In this case, it means the freedom to be oppressive and violate the freedom of others, in accordance with their religion.
Blasphemy as a crime is common in most religious societies. John William Gott was the last person in Britain to be imprisoned for heresy, in 1921. The last person to be executed for heresy in Britain was Thomas Aikenhead in 1697. Both had been critical of Christianity. The fact that Hamas are only going to imprison this man, rather than execute him, suggests that their law is only 90 years behind that of Britain.
OK you've shifted the goalposts a bit from what can be mixed up on the spot from things that get past sniffer dogs (or nitrogen sensing equipment) to stuff prepared earlier
The plotters plan was to prepare the liquid bomb earlier, and carry it onboard in a regular 500ml soft drinks bottle. The plan was to use a syringe to fill the bottle, so the "tamper proof" screw top would be intact, and the bottle would attract little notice when going through security.
As far as I know, there are no sniffer dogs or nitrogen sensing equipment in use for boarding security at most British airports. I know the government is planning to bring in some high tech scanners, but I haven't seen any yet. And even if there were such technology, would it detect explosives in a sealed plastic container, even if the outside was washed? The plotters planned to use an explosive detonator in an AA battery - if it were sealed and washed, would there be any residue for the scanners to detect?
Please note that they stop you bringing on water and not lighter fluid!
Lighter fluid is restricted to the amount you can put in a regular size refillable lighter. You can take on a litre of vodka from the departure lounge shops though, which should burn quite well.
Please tell me then what the journalists know but the worlds best chemists don't.
Sidney Alford made the liquid bomb for the BBC that is in the video I already referenced He is a qualified explosives engineer, and the man behind explosives.net. He has a long history of contracting for governments and militaries in explosives technologies, including for the U.S. Army and for the Ministry of Defense in Afghanistan. Quoting from that article, "Staff Sergeant Snowy White, of the Royal Engineers Trials and Development Unit, described Sidney as a 'pure genius'". The MOD refer to him as an expert in IEDs.
So, a recognised and qualified expert in the IED field not only built a liquid bomb, but also detonated it inside a plane fuselage, filmed by the BBC. Such an attack may require a degree of skill and planning, but it is obviously possible.
BBC News article - watch the embedded video for a real-life detonation of a liquid bomb inside an aircraft fuselage.
Why do we still have the liquid restrictions when they are not a credible threat?
The Judge in the case disagreed: "I'm satisfied that there is every likelihood that this plot would have succeeded but for the intervention of the police and the security service. Had this conspiracy not been interrupted, a massive loss of life would almost certainly have resulted - and if the detonation was over land, the number of victims would have been even greater still."
Three men are currently serving life sentences for their part in the plot.
Just look at all the people who immediately rushed to Google's defense by attacking the NLPC...
I remember the vast majority of the defensive posts being entirely technical and not political. The issue was that Google used some modified version of a tool like tcpdump, dumped raw packets, and didn't strip packets that might contain http headers or other potentially identifiable information. Nobody has alleged that Google used this raw data for anything nefarious, and nobody appears to be arguing that it's collection was anything more than a simple programming oversight. The defensive posts generally boil down to two points:
Those are both technical arguments, not U.S. political arguments.
You cannot criticize Google on Slashdot....
Sure you can, people do all the time - if Google really were secretly collecting masses of personal information then they would be criticised. But this is a really odd argument, since Google of all corporations don't have to - since they already openly collect personal information and use it to target adverts, with the full cooperation of their users. Google doesn't need to sniff private data from your public wifi, and it makes little sense that they would deliberately do so, given the huge backlash it could cause.
it would make sense that women just want sex!
Stephen Fry?
After watching a few episodes of Skins, it's obvious kids of today are out of control. Taking away their mobile phones should fix that right up.
You forgot the </sarcasm> tag. I hope.
If not exaggerated, that is mind-numbingly fucked up. I understand it to be about the same way in the UK
It is. For some reason, British people think it is not ok to beat to death the old lady who lives next door when she walks into the wrong flat, or to shoot and kill the kids down the street when they try to steal your CDs, or to execute the drunk man who walks across your lawn at 3am, or to shoot the homeless girl looking for an empty squat for the night. It's an odd society - one where you are only allowed to kill someone in defence of your own life, rather than in defence of your stuff or because they trespassed against you.
Please do explain how this works, because from where I sit it seems entirely political in nature, with a religious wrapping - which is just what the Parent is suggesting.
You are both right. The majority of people in the world are taught from birth to believe in a God, and that it is right to follow the teachings of the Holy men, including going to war. Some of the Holy men are religious fundamentalists, and they will demand war against those who follow a different religion. They will justify the war with reference to the Holy scriptures, and this will provide a self-reinforcing story that the people will follow (self-reinforcing because, as a result of the violence. they can refer to new acts of savagery that their opponent has carried out). However, the religious leaders are also rational, and will not usually carry out actions that will weaken their own power base or result in their own destruction. For example, the Iranian religious leaders will not directly attack the U.S. or Israel, as this would ensure their destruction. The violence is geo-political in nature, but in order to justify and motivate the population it is necessary to create a religious narrative that they can follow.
It wouldn't follow, though, to attack the Twin Towers. What sort of religious icon were they?
The goals of the leadership of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are geo-political: resistance against the House of Saud and it's U.S. backed dictatorship being the most obvious. There is a great amount of social injustice in Saudi Arabia, resulting from a huge inequality in the distribution of wealth - millions of ordinary people live in abject poverty, whilst a few thousand people in the royal family control trillions of dollars in personal wealth. This leads to a society in which corruption is the norm, and where the wealthy can literally "get away with murder". It is not difficult to see why ordinary people might want to replace the existing system with something that seems a little fairer. The Islamists offer them a future governance based on what they perceive to be a better system, where the rules are supposed to be applied equally regardless of wealth or position in society. Throw into this the fact that the U.S. is a major ally of the House of Saud, supplies a huge amount of military and intelligence hardware, and at one point had 10,000 troops stationed there, and it is not difficult to see how the resentment shifts from the House of Saud and onto the U.S.
The average citizen of these countries is poorly educated, and often illiterate. Justifying and motivating them towards acts of violence through geo-politics is hard - how do you convince a man to commit suicide, or otherwise take enormous personal risks, in order to destabilise the governing regime? A rational man will usually believe that his own death is not justified except in exceptional circumstances, and overthrowing his government is not usually one of those. The concept of "life after death with big rewards" is essential to the narrative that enables self-sacrifice towards the attainment of geo-political goals.
So, people attack targets like the Twin Towers because they observe massive social injustice in their home land. Their religious leaders tell them that this injustice is the fault of people outside of their social group, and that God wants them to make the world a better place, and that when they die they will receive the reward of an eternal life. They are personally motivated by religion, and by a sense that the world that they are fighting against is unjust. However, the Twin Towers is chosen as a target because it is a symbol of the injustice; this is not about "glorifying" a religion, it is about striking back against an "evil empire" that is seen as being intimately linked with the social problems of the population as a whole.
I am a religious fundamentalist
Are you really a fundamentalist, or just someone who says he is? Do you really interpret every word in the sacred texts as literal truth? If so, which holy book is it that you believe and follow unquestioningly?
And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
Science doesn't "prove" anything - we just create models that best explain the observable data. If you are willing to accept that these models better explain the world than some of the stories in your holy book, then you aren't a fundamentalist.
Indeed. The headline is alarmist - "Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland" makes it sound like they just made a huge change without consulting anyone, but Shuttleworth does say they have consulted others, and he predicts that it will take a year to get the first images out, and 4 years or more to shift applications onto Wayland. Shuttleworth is talking about a long-term direction, and it doesn't seem to be a rash decision - Intel and Nokia both appear to be backing Wayland for mobile devices.
Something like this was bound to happen after Google decided not to use X for Android. The Linux world would benefit greatly from a fast and lightweight display server that has a common codebase for mobile devices and desktops, and can be used as a backend for Android, Meego, KDE and Gnome.
If you voluntarily upload your web site to a CDN that tells you it is going to optimise your code, what legal issues could there be? The arrangement is entirely mutually consensual. If you don't want your site optimised, then don't use that CDN.
the performance of VM based systems is predictable
I agree that benchmarking a single VM on a VM host is a valid thing to do, and will give fairly reproducible results. But it can get more difficult with more complex setups. You need to be able to manage the complexity and eliminate or randomise all the factors. Benchmarking a single VM running on a VM host with 20+ other active VMs, with snapshots being created and merged, and with variable network and disk configurations, gets more difficult.
All the testing with Phoronix Test Suite is repeated until there is less than 3% variance between the results - or the result set is discarded.
What is the minimum number of replicates for each setup? 3% variance may occur easily with a low number of replicates, but that is not going to give you statistically significant results. Also, what order are the experiments run in? There may well be some autocorrelation caused by caching etc.
They tested in a VM. Now where's the proof that by itself doesn't affect performance in an unpredictable way?
If they test in a VM, on only one particular hardware configuration, then the results only apply to that specific test setup. If the fact that the experiments are run inside a VM introduces variability into the results, then this will show up as a large variance. However, having a larger variance does not in itself negate the results - but remember that the results can't be generalised to other configurations - they only apply to this particular setup.
In order to produce experimental results that can be generalised you need to run your experiments on a randomised configuration of hardware and VM host software. Either test every possible combination of factors - hardware, VM host sw, sw under test - (full factorial), or some subset (fractional factorial).
I'm usually one of the first to bash Phoronix for not doing multiple replicates or any statistical analysis of their experiments, but things appear to have changed this time. Some of the big criticisms of Phoronix's benchmarks in the past were that they didn't consider whether or not their results were significant - instead doing only one replicate for each configuration, plotting a barchart, and concluding "X was 5 FPS faster. Therefore it wins!" Apparently they're now doing multiple replicates and some proper statistics to calculate whether or not observed differences are actually statistically significant ("our kernel test results were automated, easily reproducible, and statistically significant"). Also the graphs are showing error bars +/- 1SD. This is good. This means that if you want to reproduce their experiments, it should be easy to do so. You can get an idea from the graphs whether a difference is significant.
(Having said that, I'm not sure why some of the data points don't have error bars - presumably the standard deviation was very low? I also can't see the number of replicates mentioned anywhere - maybe he used his "dynamic number of trials" scheme, but statistically speaking this may well be a bad thing - if he is using only 2 or 3 trials there is some probability of getting the first few samples with similar variance, he should probably stick to doing a fixed 10 to 30 replicates instead).
GDP numbers can be manipulated.
Do you have any evidence that the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis is producing fraudulent GDP figures?
People know with certainty if they have a job or not and how much it pays.
Yes, but what they don't know is why they can't find a job. If the economy declines and jobs are lost, then so is consumer and market confidence. In that environment, employers may be less likely to invest in new staff, even though they are seeing business pick up. The growth needs to be sustained for some time before business leaders will feel confident enough to begin taking on new employees.
Something like 86% of voters listed the economy as their first concern.
This means nothing - the economy is always the main concern of voters except in extreme situations (e.g. war). Remember the Democrats call of "It's the economy, stupid"
they haven't done anything to reverse the disaster... If the economy was actually improving the voters would not have voted as they did.
U.S. GDP growth 2006-current. Obama assumed office in January 2009. At the time growth was around -7%. Since then it rose to 5% and dropping back to 2%. Whether you believe Obama may or may not be wholly or partly responsible for this is debatable, but the turnaround in the figures after his election in early 2009 is clear.
If the economy was actually improving the voters would not have voted as they did.
Voters never vote against the incumbent party when the economy is growing?